One of our favourite times of the year is upon us once more with the return of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Running from 19 – 29 March 2015, the 13th edition of the festival delivers another diverse and exciting programme of films from across the world. And, as always, amongst this year’s programme is a fantastic line-up of Irish films, which we’ve gathered below for your convenience, beginning with the festival’s opening film The Price Of Desire, Mary McGuckian’s beautiful depiction of Irish designer Eileen Gray.
Get booking and get watching.
The Price Of Desire (Mary McGuckian)
Thursday, 19th March 2015
8:15PM
Savoy
Mary McGuckian’s The Price Of Desire, about Irish designer and architecture pioneer Eileen Gray, opens this year’s festival. Starring Orla Brady, Vincent Perez and Francesco Scianna, the Irish-Belgian co-production is the controversial story of how Eileen Gray’s contribution to 20th century architecture was almost entirely effaced from history.
Mary McGuckian, Orla Brady, and Vincent Perez will attend the screening.
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Coming Home (Viko Nikci)
Saturday, 21st March 2015
4:00PM
Light House Cinema
From the Dark (Conor McMahon)
Light House Cinema
Saturday, 21st March 2015
8:30PM
From the Dark centres on a young couple on a road trip through the Irish countryside who encounter an ancient force of evil.
Filmmakers will attend the screening.
Eat Your Children (Treasa O’Brien, Mary Jane O’Leary)
Sunday, 22nd March 2015
2:00PM
Screen Cinema
Eat Your Children is a road-trip quest by two friends who emigrated from Ireland during the financial crash of 2008 and who have now returned to probe Ireland’s so-called acceptance of debt and austerity.
The film uses formal observational footage, voxpop, archive material and a visual-essay style to create a rich and accessible tapestry of audiovisual material. It immerses the viewer into world of the protagonist-film-makers – two Irish women living and working in London and Barcelona who return home to find themselves uncovering the modern incarnations of Irish identity, post-colonialism, nationalism, globalization and resistance.
Treasa O’Brien and Mary Jane O’Leary will attend the screening.
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The Great Wall (Tadhg O’Sullivan )
Monday, 23rd March 2015
6:00PM
IFI
Filmmaker’s statement: ‘The Great Wall has been completed at its most southerly point.’ So begins Kafka’s short story ‘At the Building of the Great Wall of China’, and so, at Europe’s heavily militarised south-eastern frontier, begins this film.
In the shadow of its own narratives of freedom, Europe has been quietly building its own great wall. Like its famous Chinese precursor, this wall has been piecemeal in construction, diverse in form and dubious in utility. Gradually cohering across the continent, this system of enclosure and exclusion is urged upon a populace seemingly willing to accept its necessity and to contribute to its building.
From Europe’s edges, The Great Wall moves across various unidentified fortified landscapes, pausing with those whose lives are framed by borders and walls. Moving inward toward the seat of power, the film holds the European project up to a dazzling cinematic light, refracted through Kafka’s mysterious text, ultimately questioning the nature of power within Europe and beyond.
The filmmakers will attend the screening.
Talking to My Father (Sé Merry Doyle)
Tuesday, 24th March 2015
6:00PM
IFI
Talking to my Father features two voices from two eras each concerned with how we as a nation understand the architecture that surrounds our lives. Modern architecture in Ireland reached a high point in the early sixties and one of its most celebrated and influential figures was Robin Walker. Robin studied under le Corbusier in Paris as a young graduate and later worked alongside Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. His return to Ireland in 1958 coincided with the emergence of an aspiring modern nation recovering from years of stagnation and emigration. Robin Walker became a key agent in this nation-building process.
A quarter of a century after his premature death, Simon addresses his father again and explores the legacy of his life’s work.
Miss Julie (Liv Ullmann)
Tuesday, 24th March 2015
6:15PM
Cineworld
Over the course of a midsummer night in Fermanagh in 1890, an unsettled daughter of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy encourages her father’s valet to seduce her. A co-production from Norway/UK/Ireland/France, Miss Julie stars Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell.
All About Eva (Ferdia Mac Anna)
Wednesday, 25th March 2015
6:00PM
Light House Cinema
All About Eva is an old-school thriller about a young woman seeking revenge upon a wealthy racing magnate whom she blames for destroying her family.
The filmmakers will attend the screening.
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After the Dance (Daisy Asquith)
Thursday, 26th March 2015
8:00PM
Light House Cinema
Filmmaker Daisy Asquith tells the very personal story of her mother’s conception after a dance in the 1940s on the remote west coast of Ireland. Her grandmother, compelled to run away to have her baby in secret, handed the child over to ‘the nuns’. Daisy’s mum was eventually adopted by English Catholics from Stoke on Trent. Her grandmother returned to Ireland and told no-one. The father remained a mystery for another 60 years. Until Daisy and her mum decided it was time to find out who he was. Their desperate need to know takes them on a fascinating and moving adventure in social and sexual morality and the fear and shame that Catholicism has wrought on the Irish psyche for centuries, and connecting them with a brand new family living an extraordinarily different life.
Daisy Asquith will attend the screening.
Dare to be Wild (Vivienne De Courcy)
Thursday, 26th March 2015
8:30PM
Light House Cinema
Dare to be Wild is the story of one woman who sowed the seed of change… It tells the extraordinary and inspiriting true story of Irishwoman Mary Reynold’s journey from rank outsider to winner of a Gold Medal at the Chelsea Flower Show. Mary grew up with a strong affinity to the environment and a belief that somehow it was her destiny to use her talent as a designer to put environmental issues centre stage. Wild follows her journey from naive and impressionable ingenue to a impassioned and pioneering designer.
The filmmakers will attend the screening.
Glassland (Gerard Barrett)
Friday, 27th March 2015
6:30PM
Light House Cinema
In in a desperate bid to save his mother (Toni Colette) from addiction and unite his broken family, a young taxi driver (Jack Reynor) on the fringes of the criminal underworld is forced to take a job which will see him pushed further into its underbelly. But will John be prepared to act when the time comes knowing that whatever he decides to do, his and his family’s lives will be changed forever.
Gerard Barrett and Jack Reynor will attend the screening.
Ten Years In The Sun (Rouzbeh Rashidi)
Friday, 27th March 2015
8:00PM
Light House Cinema
An assortment of obscure private obsessions, conspiracies and perversions flicker on the verge of inoherence against the context of vast cosmic disaster in Rouzbeh Rashidi’s boldest film to date. This sensory onslaught combines a homage to the subversive humour of Luis Buñuel and Joao Cesar Monteiro with the visionary scope of a demented science fiction epic.
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Tana Bana (Pat Murphy)
Friday, 27th March 2015
8:40PM
Light House Cinema
Varanasi is the ancient city on the Ganges where Hindu pilgrims come to bathe at dawn and where cremation fires burn along the sacred river long after night has fallen. The city is also famous for the Moslem silk weavers whose ancestors traveled along the Silk Road and whose history is interwoven with that of their Hindu neighbours.
Loosely structured as a day in the life of Varanasi, this unique, intimate documentary explores how the Moslem community of weavers respond to huge economic shifts in their lives and shows the difficulties they face in passing on traditional weaving skills to their children. The film also gives voice to the changing roles of women within this enclosed world.
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Let Us Prey (Brian O’Malley)
Friday, 27th March 2015
10:40PM
Light House Cinema
Rachel, a rookie cop, is about to begin her first nightshift in a neglected police station in a Scottish, backwater town. The kind of place where the tide has gone out and stranded a motley bunch of the aimless, the forgotten, the bitter-and-twisted who all think that, really, they deserve to be somewhere else. They all think they’re there by accident and that, with a little luck, life is going to get better. Wrong, on both counts. Six is about to arrive – and All Hell Will Break Loose!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2fnLntATUo
Yximalloo (Tadhg O’Sullivan, Feargal Ward)
Saturday, 28th March 2015
2:00PM
Light House Cinema
Wheel Of Fortune: The Story And Legacy Of The Fairview Lion Tamer (Joe Lee)
Saturday, 28th March 2015
3:30PM
Light House Cinema
Filmmaker’s statement: Wheel of Fortune is a documentary feature film about Bill Stephens, an ordinary young man in 1950s Ireland with an extraordinary ambition: to become an international circus star. It is also a love story about Bill and his young and beautiful wife May, from East Wall. Their double act, Jungle Capers, Bill Stephens and Lovely Partner, was a series of death-defying feats with a troupe of lions and dogs designed to thrill audiences in the circus tent and on the stage. With this act they hoped to break free from the suffocating reality of Irish life, but things went terribly wrong when, in November 1951, one of their animals escaped. The story gained national and international attention at the time, but it is only now – after 60 years of silence – that two families and a community have come together to tell the story in full.
The filmmakers will attend the screening.
The Canal (Ivan Kavanagh)
Saturday, 28th March 2015
8:30PM
Light House Cinema
Set in rural Ireland, The Canal stars Rupert Evans as David, a film archivist with a morbid fascination for old films in which the subjects have since died. Right after learning that his wife may be cheating on him, she mysteriously disappears at the same time that his assistant Claire finds an old reel of film that points to a murder that took place in his house a hundred years ago. David starts to suspect her disappearance may involve some form of the supernatural but he also quickly becomes the prime suspect.
Rupert Evans will attend the screening.
Comments
After the Dance is so moving film – I do enjoyed the picture of morality pictured for me by the actors!